2002-10-09 3:47 PM
That Thing That's Going Around, and Meat Bucket
So many of you Diarylanders are writing about your crisp, lovely falls, with the leaves fluttering joyfully from the trees, and that charming little nip in the air that means winter is gently tapping you on the shoulder, saying, "Hello, friend! It's time to stock up on snow boots again!"
Not here in the Bay Area -- September and October are the hottest months of the year, with conditions we tend to associate with things falling down and catching on fire and such. The thing that well and truly sucks about it is that, while we have to wait a bit for cooler weather, some years we don't have to wait for fall's round of flu viruses to come around. Flu + hot hot weather + no AC = just no fun at all. And this would be one of those years.
Dad started coming down with this year's extra-nasty edition of the flu and submitted himself to the gentle ministrations of Kaiser. ("Oh, it's That Thing That's Going Around. Here's a scrip for cough syrup with codeine. Take two spoonfuls and don't call us in the morning. Now get out of our office. Nnnnnnext!")
Everyone at work is starting to cough and sniffle, and the sick days are bound to start piling up soon. I've been taking vitamins and drinking gallons of water in a valiant but probably doomed effort to fight it off.
TheBoy has had the worst of it -- for the past two weeks it's left him coughing, wheezing and otherwise curling up in a ball and whimpering.
(He ought to have been in bed for at least a week of that. However, one of the joys of contracting is the lack of paid sick time, which is probably one of the reasons this year's model of flu has managed to spread as quickly as it has. Companies can play accounting tricks with contractors' pay that they can't with regular employees' salaries, and in a bad economy this no doubt looks appealing, despite the fact that it makes your company a disease vector. Maybe that's why they push so hard on the flu shot campaigns, too. But I digress. Back to TheBoy.)
For the first week of it he just lolled around, staring at the walls and being utterly miserable. Disease was his fate and he would never, ever know what it was like to feel better. After that, he'd vacillate between feeling good and curling up into a little ball again. This morning he started getting snarky, which is a sure sign he's on the mend. And he's started fantasizing about post-flu life, much in the way a convict fantasizes about life on the outside.
"I have to get better by next Wednesday," he declared this morning, "because we are going to Meat Bucket. Mmm, Meat Bucket."
TheBoy and his biker trash buddies go to dinner most Wednesday nights, and Meat Bucket is shorthand for a bar in Richmond that serves barbecue from its back door. One of the buddies told them, in his typically exaggerated fashion, that they actually sold huge buckets of barbecue at this place and that they had to go. The "buckets" turned out to be those big, flimsy aluminum roasting trays they have for two bucks at Safeway around Thanksgiving, but the meat was good, and the name Meat Bucket stuck.
I sense another "get Magpie to eat meat again" campaign in the offing.